 Vincent Sherman (Boston Phoenix)
Here's my favorite movie trivia question: what living film director can claim the earliest extant film? The answer: Portugal's Manoel de Olivieira, born in 1908 and, remarkably, still directing, made a silent documentary, Working on the Douro River, in 1931,.75 years ago! In second place: ex-MIT filmmaking head, Richard Leacock, born in 1921, made Canary Islands Bananas in 1935, when he was a 14-year-old fledgling documentarian. But what about a Hollywood feature?
The answer has just changed, because Vincent Sherman, a prolific Warner Brothers contract director, died June 16 at the Motion Picture &Television Fund Hospital,. He was a month short of his 100 th birthday. more

• Larry Clark - A gay critic at a major metropolitan newspaper (not the Globe) got pretty darned perturbed about Larry Clark's Wassup Rockers, branding it a "chicken hawk" movie, Well, it can't be denied that his latest opus contains the requisite lot of bare-chested teen boys, a twink motif going back to Clark's 197l photo classic, Tulsa. Yet I found it hard to get mad at Wassup Rockers. more• Jay Duplass - Because of her banner work for Errol Morris (The Fog of War, etc.), Boston's Karen Schmeer was hired by Hollywood filmmaker Sidney Pollock (They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Tootsie) to edit Pollock's first documentary, Sketches of Frank Gehry. The post-production was done in an unusual way: Schmeer cut the footage in New York, Pollock would fly in from the coast and check things out, then fly back. more• Sydney Pollock - Because of her banner work for Errol Morris (The Fog of War, etc.), Boston's Karen Schmeer was hired by Hollywood filmmaker Sidney Pollock (They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Tootsie) to edit Pollock's first documentary, Sketches of Frank Gehry. The post-production was done in an unusual way: Schmeer cut the footage in New York, Pollock would fly in from the coast and check things out, then fly back. more • Luc and Jeane-Piere Dardennes - At last year's Cannes Film Festival, where "l'Enfant" ("The Child") won the Palm D'Or jury prize, the Belgian brother filmmakers, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardennes, talked excitedly about their film. Therein, a young street hoodlum, Bruno (Jeremie Renier), casually sells off his newborn, to the horror of the mother, his teenager girlfriend, Sonia (Deborah Francois). Just who is the titular baby? more

• Sir! No Sir! - David Zeigler's Sir! No Sir! is yet another documentary that George W. probably won't see, or want you to see, because, as the Prez often cautions, "It sends the wrong message to our troops." Does it ever! By chronicling the little-known story of war resistance within the American military during the Vietnam War, our guys and gals being shipped to Iraq could get some seditious ideas. more• I Am a Sex Addict - Guys prattle on forever about the women they supposedly laid, but stay mum revealing anything that smacks of the perverse. Do any of my male friends watch porno into the deep night, get jerked off at massage parlors, bring escorts into their condos for kinky S&M encounters? I don't know, no pal informs me, nor do they know anything sexually creepy about me. more• Art School Confidential - Terry Zwigoff started off amazingly, with the masterly documentary, Crumb (1995), followed by the stunning feature Ghost World (2001), both anthems to outsiders and outsider art, in praise of postBeatnik eccentricity and freakiness. Was Zwigoff the Great Weird Hope of American cinema? more• Fallen Idol - It's easy for me to say, because I don't have to put butts into seats, but wouldn't it be great if repertoire houses programmed a series of adaptations of the late British novelist, Graham Greene? What fun! Except for Patricia Highsmith (they were pen pals), he's the most Hitchcockian of writers, a master of beautifully plotted espionage thrillers. more

 Silverdocs 2006 - It's like when your haircutter jumps to a new salon: you scurry after. So I was off to Silver Spring, Maryland, and the 4 th Silverdocs Documentary Festival earlier this month, because Sky Sitney, previously of the Newport Film Festival, had taken over as Director of Programming. How would this expert chooser of films make out, with, at her disposal, the three houses at the American Film Institute's sumptuously restored AFI Silver Theatre? more Full Frame 2006 - I'm here in Durham, chowing down North Carolina-style barbeque (hacked-up pig, tangy vinegar sauce) off a paper plate, complemented by sweetened iced tea, and in the company of several hundred stalwart American documentarians (among them: Rich Leackock, D.A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles) at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. more

 No Respect?I've recently been researching a documentary on the history of American film criticism, and examining fictional works which include critics as characters. What I suspected has been verified: forget about "positive role models." more

• Phillip Lopate We can't compete with buccaneers of the Caribbean--the sword is mightier than the pen--but film reviewers lately have been getting a smidgen of respect, thanks to keen attention paid to American Movie Critics: an Anthology from the Silents Until Now (The Library of America, $40). There have been lengthy, exceedingly respectful reviews in places that count; and Phillip Lopate, the anthology's editor, was offered, for a Spring book tour, the full-plate speaking schedule of a literary star, capped by multiple MPR visits. more• Jim Jarmusch - Stealing someone's screenplay is serious stuff. I know first-hand, for, a decade ago, the LA-based director-co-writer of a feature we wrote together crossed my name off the script. When I sued via a nice-guy Hub attorney, she countersued with a Beverly Hills big shot who had defended Spielberg. What chance did I have, when this $$$$$ shyster contended that I stayed over at the young lady's house not to write the screenplay but because I was desperately trying to bed her! It just got uglier, more traumatic. And costly.more• Best Short Narrative Films of All Time Here's the e-mail sentence which freezes my marrow: "Dear critic: I just completed a short film, which I think you will enjoy." No, I probably won't! Don't send it to me! 90 per cent of short films are mishaps, sitcom-derived farces awash in frosh-dorm jokes or elephantine melodramas drowning in sophomoric Meaning. Too meager, or too much. more

 Who Is Gerald Peary?Gerald Peary has been a much-published North American film critic for more than twenty-five years. His cinema articles have appeared in many newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Toronto Globe and Mail, The Chicago Tribune, and The Boston Globe. more

Please visit some of these other film critics whose commentary on cinema is extremely valuable: J. Hoberman at the Village Voice Henry Sheehan has been a professional film critic for over 25 years and has been published in Film Comment, Sight and Sound, the Chicago Reader, the Boston Globe, and LA Weekly.(Visit our links page for more film critics) John Powers has just launched his book - Sore Winners.

• My Dad is 100 Years Old - Among very advanced cineastes, including Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Martin Scorsese, the cinema doesn't get more profound than the movies of Roberto Rossellini. more• Mongolian Ping Pong - Decades and decades ago, I was teen table-tennis champ of Columbia, South Carolina (let's brag: singles and doubles). So I looked forward keenly to that great sport finally being represented on the silver screen: Ning Hao's Mongolian Ping Pong. Can't you see it, a kind of Asian Rocky, about a loser in life who becomes, cushioned paddle in hand, a winner, with the eye of a tiger and a backhand smash to die for? more• The Beauty Academy of Kabul - Filmed in Afghanistan just months after the seeming smashing of the Taliban, Liz Merwin's engaging The Beauty Academy of Kabul already seems a nostalgia item remembering a better, more optimistic time. more Mini Reviews
An assortment of Mini Reviews. more